Thursday, 12 July 2012

Spiral orb webs showing some colours in the
sunlight in a gorge in Karijini National Park, Western Australia,
Australia: photo by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, 28 November 2008

Night and its cortège SomeoneSpiders the paneDon't open the windowIt's only the wind.
Take refugeIn yourself and run fromMemories that compelYou toward a past
That doesn't exist. For it's thenArrivesThe hour of the foxTo drag you one more timeBack into this life.

Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes), male, Top Of The World Highway, Near Boundary, Yukon: photo by Alan D. Wilson, 2007

On the other side, true dispatch is a rich thing. For time is the measure of business, as money is of wares; and business is bought at a dear hand, where there is small dispatch. The Spartans and Spaniards have been noted to be of small dispatch; Mi venga la muerte de Spagna; Let my death come from Spain; for then it will be sure to be long in coming.

Bears and foxes and spiders have a different sense of time and how would we know about that, the vigils, the spinning, the hibernation. Slowness.

They don't die of depression or unhappiness unless cruelly held captive like those party bears. A fox being chased by hounds might die of terror but not of unhappiness. It is difficult to imagine a depressed spider. Though earlier tonight I was looking at some webs spun by drugged spiders in "experiments". That's science for you, feed high doses of caffeine to a spider and then take pictures of the fucked up webs. Speed up the spiders, deprive them of their natural slowness, observe them at their labours, maniacally spinning jagged designs that look a bit like "spiderweb"-patterned bullet-shattered glass. (They give grants for that.)

The ending for this Spanish poet was not slow but sudden though it did come from and in his native land... if, that is, Catalunya be considered a part of Spain.

(The book this poem comes from is an elegiac remembrance of his mother, Julia Gay, who died in Francoist bombing. The poet passed her name on to his own daughter.)

Yes, the poem seems to inhabit that vague zone between dream and waking, when consciousness itself might spider the pane with an uncommon dread in anticipation... of one is never sure nor can later quite remember what. (The not being sure and the later not quite remembering would then be small mercies.)

The alert fox of the conscious mind chases off these arachnoid notions, but they may be counted on to return again, with their dark exacting processions of intuition, imagination and almost-thought.